The Government of India has launched National Strategic Plan (NSP) & Roadmap for Leprosy (2023-27) on 30th January, 2023, to achieve zero transmission of leprosy by 2027 i.e. three years ahead of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3.3.
India has achieved the elimination of leprosy as a public health problem as per WHO criteria of less than 1 case per 10,000 population at the National level in 2005.
The NSP and Roadmap contains implementation strategies, year-wise targets, public health approaches and overall technical guidance for the programme.
The strategy and roadmap focuses on awareness for zero stigma & discrimination, promotion of early case detection, prevention of disease transmission by prophylaxis (Leprosy Post Exposure Prophylaxis) and roll out of web-based information portal (Nikusth 2.0) for reporting of leprosy cases.
In Madhya Pradesh the leprosy prevalance rate is 0.9 per 10000 population.
After achieving elimination status at national level, National Leprosy Eradication Programme (NLEP) has taken a number of initiatives to encourage early case detection of leprosy patients to prevent Grade 2 Disabilities, and to ensure free of cost treatment of leprosy patients.
There are few districts within States/UTs, where leprosy is endemic.
With various intervention introduced under NLEP in the last few years, number of new leprosy cases detected have come down to 75,394 in 2021-22 from 1,25,785 in 2014-15, accounting for 53.6% of global new leprosy cases.
